A synthesizer built inside a PlayStation controller, reusing its own components

I bought a baby keyboard, a maze ball toy and this PlayStation controller just for 1 or 2 euros in a secondhand market called ‘Muehlenmarkt’, which takes place first Friday of each month in the Berliner club Griessmuehle.

I dismantled the controller and started to modify its circuit printed on plastic-paper, connecting different circuit locations with ‘jumper wire’ to hear what noises it could make, just like in ‘circuit bending’ and toys.

I built a small synthesizer inside it with 3 electronic oscillators and a LFO reusing the controller’s components. Both joysticks, and the four trigger buttons (L1, L2, R1, R2) worked as button controls. I also added two switch that worked as PowerON/OFF and another one that commutes the LFO.

I placed the 9V battery at the back through a ‘backpack’.

The most difficult part was recyling the circuit components. It was all printed on a kind of plastic circuit I didn’t knew. Using alligator clips I bent its different parts and played around with the protoboard.

It was quite difficult and a bit sloppy. The hardest part was to close the controller with the new components inside. There was no space… and the screws weren’t long enough to put them together again…

I placed the components in the gaps and tried to close it again, and at the end I could make it by pressing a bit.

I also created a small open tactile circuit with the bottom of two screws to modulate one of the oscillators. We add different electrical resistance depending on how we touch these two screws that are quite sensitive. The electric current flow varies and the oscillator starts to change, modulating the frequency and sound of itself and of the next oscillator as well.